William the Bastard – Brew Day 2

Brew Day 2 – January 6, 2011

Today we racked the beer from our primary to our secondary. This is the quickest stage of brewing I find. The majority of our time was spent sanitizing all of our equipment.

This is what the beer looked like after sitting in the primary:

Once sanitizing was finished, we got everything setup in the brewing area of my basement and started the auto siphon.

Next we just stood there and held the auto siphon in place being careful not to disturb the sediment at the bottom of the primary. We carefully tilted the bucket to get all the beer we could without bring along the sediment. There was very minimal beer left on top of the sediment when we were finished.

We kept the siphon in that last few drops and detached the one of the hose. We then took turns sucking a bit of the remaining beer from the  bucket to get a sample of our creation. Despite our own curiosity this isn’t bad practice to ensure that your batch hasn’t spoiled already through contamination or anything else.

We were both quite impressed with the taste and are now very excited for the finished product.

Once the carboy was full of our brew we put a bung and airlock in the top and hoisted it up onto the elevated surface. Best to do this now while any sediment in the carboy is already stirred up. You don’t want to do the lifting immediately before you bottle the beer or you will kick it all up and more sediment will  end up in your bottles.

We didn’t take any measurements of the beer (i.e. specific gravity) because the data at this point does not really matter too much. In other words, it doesn’t factor into the calculation to determine your alcohol by volume (ABV) at the end of the process. At least that was my thinking at the time.

In retrospect, we probably should have taken those reading and recorded them. I was thinking if my batch screwed up (or ended up delicious) we could compare our second attempt at it to these data points to see if we were on the right track. I suspect it would have given us the ability to be more consistent if we attempt this beer again in the future.

Should be about a week in the secondary and we can bottle!

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